Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

2 twenty-first century will, for the majority of youth, be workforce training. Thus, the need for Pavlovian/ Skinnerian methodology based on operant conditioning which, in essence, is at the heart of the above dehumanizing definition of education. This “sowing of the seeds” through redefinition will reap the death of traditional, liberal arts education through the advent of mastery learning, outcome-based education, and direct instruction—all of which will be performance-based and behaviorist.

1762

E MILE BY J EAN -J ACQUES R OUSSEAU (C HEZ J EAN N EAULME D UCHESNE : A. A MSTERDAM [Paris], 1762) was published. Rousseau’s “Social Contract” presented in Emile influenced the French Revolution. In this book Rousseau promoted child-centered “permissive education” in which a teacher “should avoid strict discipline and tiresome lessons.” Both Rousseau (1712–1788) and Swiss educator Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746–1827) believed that the “whole child” should be educated by “doing,” and that religion should not be a guiding principle in edu cation, a theme we shall see repeated over the next 238 years.

1832

W ILHELM W UNDT , FOUNDER OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY AND THE FORCE BEHIND ITS dissemi nation throughout the Western world, was born in 1832 in Neckarau, southern Germany. The following excerpts concerning Wundt’s contribution to modern education are taken from The Leipzig Connection: The Systematic Destruction of American Education by Paolo Lionni and Lance J. Klass 3 (Heron Books: Portland, Ore., 1980): To Wundt, a thing made sense and was worth pursuing if it could be measured, quantified, and scientifically demonstrated. Seeing no way to do this with the human soul, he proposed that psychology concern itself solely with experience. As Wundt put it... Karl Marx injected Hegel’s theories with economics and sociology, developing a “philosophy of dialectical materialism.”… (p. 8) From Wundt’s work it was only a short step to the later redefinition of education. Origi nally, education meant drawing out of a person’s innate talents and abilities by imparting the knowledge of languages, scientific reasoning, history, literature, rhetoric, etc.—the channels through which those abilities would flourish and serve. To the experimental psychologist, however, education became the process of exposing the student to “meaningful” experiences so as to ensure desired reactions:

[L]earning is the result of modifiability in the paths of neural conduction. Explanations of even such forms of learning as abstraction and generalization demand of the neurones only growth, excitability, conductivity, and modifiability. The mind is the connection-system of man; and learning is the process of connecting. The situation-response formula is adequate to cover learning of any sort, and the really influential factors in learning are readiness of the neurones, sequence in time, belongingness, and satisfying consequences. 4

If one assumes (as did Wundt) that there is nothing there to begin with but a body, a brain, a nervous system, then one must try to educate by inducing sensations in that ner-